MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY CHINESE LITERATURE

This course aims at helping students obtain a deeper knowledge of some themes and texts of modern and contemporary Chinese literature (from the early twentieth century up to the present day), while training them develop critical awareness and a method of research, mainly based on the close reading of texts (including texts in Chinese). Students will be also guided in setting Chinese literature within a larger cultural, social, and historical perspective, throughout hte shaping of modern China, and to present their personal reflections on the contents of the course by means of both written (final paper) and oral discussions.
The main subject of the course addresses the environmental turn of recent dystopian literature produced in China.

1. Knowledge and understanding:
• Know the historical and social context in which each writer's attitudes, ideas and works took shape, and their interplay with the society and cultural life of the time;
• Know the literary trends defining the historical context: students will be guided into a critical reflection upon the literary texts read in class weekly, in order to let them recognise their stylistic features and understand the underlying meanings, also in relation with the shaping of modern Chinese society and culture.
2. Ability to apply knowledge and understanding
• Students will be able to recognise and categorise texts in terms of genre, linguistic and lexical features specific of the author's time and social context;
• Students will be able to analyse and compare literary texts and phenomena to western literature;
3. Judgement capacity
• assess the level of one’s knowledge of texts, genres and textual analysys skill;
4. Communication skills
• argumentative skill;
• be able to communicate orally by means of class presentation and in the final exam, with clarity of exposition and accuracy in citing sources (both English and Chinese sources)
• be able to communicate in written form (final paper), demonstrating a general knowledge of the sources and of the basic rules of academic writing.
5. Learning skills
Students' ability to analyse and research autonomously Chinese literature will be tested through the final paper they are requested to write on a new topic agreed upon with the teacher. Besides, oral skills and argumentative skills will be tested during the class presentation and the final oral exam, by which they will have to demonstrate their general understanding and critical view on the course contents.

A good knowledge of Chinese language is requested, in order to be able to read modern literary texts and literary criticism in Chinese. A basic knowledge of the history of Chinese literature in the twentieth century is also recommended.

The proliferation of dystopian novels is a new feature of contemporary Chinese literature over the last decades. However, this anti-utopian narrative is rather a form of renewal of the genre than the evidence of a form of entropy of the fictional world: the desire for alterity in this narrative persists through the critique of catastrophes of history and the established order. This course aims at studying this duality of utopia and disenchantment, by scrutinising the way in which this narrative discourse, in its twofold configuration - referential and imagined - is written, translated and read in order to question the political discourse.

MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE
Nicoletta Pesaro, Melinda Pirazzoli, La narrativa cinese del Novecento. Autori, opere, correnti. Roma, Carocci, 2019 o
Kirk Denton ed., The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, New Work, Columbia University Press, 2016.
Chi, Pang-yuan and David Der-wei Wang (ed.), Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century. A Critical Survey, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Peng, Hsiao-yen and Isabelle Rabut (eds.), Modern China and West. Translation and Cultural Mediation, Leiden, Brill, 2014.
Pesaro, Nicoletta et Yinde Zhang (ed.), « Littérature chinoise et globalisation. Enjeux linguistiques, traductologiques et génériques », Translating Wor(l)ds 1, 2017.
Shih, Shu-mei Chien-Hsin Tsai and Brian Bernards, Sinophone Studies. A Critical Reader, New York, Columbia University Press, 2013.
Tsu, Jing and David Der-wei Wang (ed.), Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays, Leiden: Brill, 2010
David Wang, Angela Ki Che Leung and Zhang Yinde (ed.), Utopia and Utopianism in the Contemporary Chinese Context : Texts, Ideas, and Spaces, Hong Kong, HKU Press, 2020.
A New Literary History of Modern China, ed. by David Der-wei Wang, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2017.
陈思和 (编) 中国当代文学史教程, 复旦大学出版社，2019年 (第二版)
Hong Zicheng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, translated by Michael M. Day, Brill, 2008.

GEOCRITICISM
Foucault, Michel, Des espaces autres, 1967, 1984;
Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991.
Lefebvre, Henri, La Production de l’espace, 1974;
Moraru, Christian, Reading for the Planet. Toward a Geomethodology, Ann Arbor, university of Michigan Press, 2015
Soja, Edward, Post-modern Geographies, en 1989; Spatial Turn: Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Oxford, 1996;
Tally, Robert. Utopia in the Age of Globalization: Space, Representation, and the World System. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Geocritical Explorations. Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and
Cultural Studies, Edited by Robert T. Tally Jr. Foreword by Bertrand Westphal, 2011; Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019.
The Planeary Turn. Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern university press, 2015
Westphal, Bertrand, Geocriticism. Real and Fictional Spaces, Robert T. Tally trans., Palgrave Macmillan (2011)

ONLINE SOURCES
Sinosphere
Paper Republic
Denton Bibliography
SSS
CNKI
Words without borders https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/find/languages/chinese
https://clt.oucreate.com/

The exam for attending students is divided into two parts:

1) short paper (max. 3500 words) to be handed in at least one week before the oral exam;
2) oral exam about the individual paper and the general contents of the course.

Non-attending students will have to agree on a topic (related to the course content) with the teacher and write a paper of about 10 thousand words. The paper shall be sent by email at least two weeks before the oral exam. During the exam, the student will present and discuss his/her paper and will be asked general questions about the contents of the course.
Please have a look at the teacher's material on the moodle platform for the guide to essay-writing.

Classes will be carried out both in presence and online. The teaching methods include a close-reading of primary texts, through which relevant topics will be presented and analysed, and a discussion with students on assigned readings.

English

further bibliographic information and Chinese texts will be provided throughout the course

oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Climate change and energy" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development